Sport on TV: Stubbs survives death by cardboard

By Giles Smith

12:01AM BST 15 Jul 2002

The central premise of the first part of Saturday night's Sport Relief telethon on BBC1 was that people will pay good money to see Ray Stubbs of Football Focus dropped from a great height. Something there for television producers and event promoters to mull over at work this morning.

Not just good money, actually: amazing money. With the British public pulling together in a manner pretty much unseen since the Second World War, nearly £1 million was pledged inside two hours on the guarantee that Ray would be winched up another 10 feet for every £100,000 that arrived - and then dropped onto a wildly unreassuring pile of cardboard boxes. With the result that, come 9pm and the traditional adult programming watershed, Ray's crane had raised him to a truly mesmerising 100 feet.

Down below, doing some serious reporting for once, stood Newsnight's Peter Snow. "Wow!" Peter Snow said, as Ray Stubbs dangled above him. (That's not a sentence I was ever expecting to be able to write). Ray was in a padded suit for his protection. At least I think he was. He may just have put on a lot of weight during the World Cup. Maybe he took John Motson seriously about the breakfasts.

Incidentally, this was all taking place live in the Millennium Dome - one in the eye for all those cynics who said the Dome was a gross waste of public money that would never find a worthwhile purpose. These days, with all those useless exhibits on the themes of money and reproduction out of the way, the Dome is one big drop zone - undeniably the perfect space for attaching a television presenter to a crane and letting him go, almost to the point where you imagine that this was the key thing on the mind of Richard Rogers when he designed it. At any rate, it's amazing that no-one has thought of dropping Ray Stubbs there before.

At the big moment, with the nation closer to its television sets than at any moment since the England v Argentina World Cup game, the clip keeping Ray aloft unclipped and he began his brief but terrifying plummet towards the cardboard.

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The noise Ray made during his descent was not like anything one had ever heard from a presenter of Football Focus, even during the Bob Wilson era. Indeed, I'm not sure television has broadcast its like before, though I dimly recall a David Attenborough-presented documentary about the mating habits of penguins which may have contained a sound that came close.

What Ray appeared to emit as the vacant floor of the Millennium Dome rose up to meet him was not a cartoon shriek of terror or a film actor's howl, but something more chillingly real - a mid-range and touchingly feeble moan. It was the noise of a man who has entirely handed his fate to a pile of boxes.

It took a team of qualified box-wranglers some time to dig Ray out. As they rapidly tossed the boxes aside, one of the handlers kept shouting, "Are you all right, Ray?" And from Ray there came the unmistakable sound of no reply. That was understandable because he probably had a mouthful of cardboard at the time, but his muteness, combined with the sight of all those men in sweat-shirts scrambling to create an airway, made those few seconds genuinely alarming.

Peter Snow had already shown us what a 100-foot drop can do to vegetable matter by releasing a melon from Ray's crane. Bingo: melon juice. That said, the melon landed directly on the concrete, rather than on a bed of cardboard. And also Ray's no melon, whatever anyone may say.

Still, it must have been awful for Ray's relatives to contemplate the potential consequences at that moment. And it was pretty bad for regular viewers of Football Focus, too. What if Ray had killed himself and was thus out for the season, and they let Mark Lawrenson be the presenter? It didn't bear thinking about.

He survived, though. More than that, he walked tall out of the debris - a happy outcome given that the impact might well have compressed him to the size of a giveaway in a cereal packet. I'd say he had a right to walk tall for ever more. As a result of Ray Stubbs dropping from a great height, children will be rescued from poverty and given an education. Another unlikely sentence. But a true one.

It took the comedian Patrick Kielty to point out that Sport Relief meant more than just a meeting between Garry Flitcroft, of Blackburn Rovers, and a lap-dancer. But by then the hour was late, and I suspect we had all realised long ago what Sport Relief amounted to, even as we watched the cast of Holby City compete with the cast of EastEnders to toss a melon over a bar.

(Melons featured surprisingly prominently in the evening, not least in a very bad joke by Gary Lineker).

The central premise of the second part of Sport Relief was that people would pay good money to see Bob Mortimer hit Les Dennis in a boxing ring.

Again, people did. Charity is a peculiar business. Often alleged to begin at home, it seems to work more efficiently, in fact, when it begins in the Millennium Dome, 100 feet up a crane, and then comes back to your home in the form of television pictures. And if that's what it takes, so be it.